Love’s inspiration?

 

June 12, 1982

 

There are peace marches in New York City today, and singers singing.

It has all the spirit that made the 1960s live, lights again upon the cold face of skyscrapers, while us “old folks” lie on our couches and suffer to heal our weary bones, understanding perfectly that this isn’t the 1960s.

Hank fell asleep on Pauly’s couch after Pauly’s parents invited us to their family picnic. When he woke up, he got up, and said he was going home to take a nap.

I can’t keep any of these cycles straight – this change in the world that doesn’t go around in circles so much as spirals, and we tend to repeat but not completely, and evolve up or down to land not in the same place, but some place similar, on some different plain.

We – now that we’re all firmly in our 30s – aren’t the same as we were; we no long kick and scream, ranting in our twenty-something insanity as we once did.

Pauly tends his garden like a good little warlock, trying to sell us on a mystique he has already sold himself on. He’s always self-promoting a myth that can’t be created that way.

And me, I go home to clean my apartment, trying to sort through the accumulated possessions and put them in their proper place, when none have a proper place to be put in.

I am very aware of how “not the same” as I was, and I keep thinking of Louise, who I have not physically seen in more than five years, and try to anticipate what she will think of this new me when we meet, and if this self will scare her off the way my old self did.

I am a lost cause no matter who I am, clinging to this last slim thread with the hopes that it will lead to love.

I don’t want to die like this: alone.

I don’t want to spend the next ten years putting flowers on the graves of my dying friends. Hank will likely be dead by 40; Pauly might live longer; Garrick will live forever, an angry, lonely hermit with no love to call his own, and little hope of finding any, or caring whether he does or not.

I suspect I’ll outlive them all, and I’m scared that if I don’t find love first, I’ll be the last old man on the park bench spreading seed for the pigeons.

I hope this isn’t another 1974 and that Louise will consider me worth keeping this time.

I feel so heavy like a chunk of lead, unable to move my feet quickly in any direction. I feel hollow and transparent, unable to hide anything except the intense need to be happy.

Louise has come back into my life; but I’m not ready; I never will be. So let her come. Maybe that part of the 1960s still runs in my blood, just hot enough to still inspire love.